LECTURE 7: UNIVERSALITY AS STABILIZATION — FROM CHRISTIAN COSMOS TO KANTIAN FORMALISM

I. PRELIMINARY FRAMING

This lecture analyzes moral universalism not as philosophical discovery but as institutional technology. It traces a single structural problem across three epistemic regimes: Christian cosmology, Enlightenment moral philosophy, and liberal political order. The problem is not ethical but systemic: how does a fragmented, commercially expanding, theologically splintered Europe generate normative coherence when confronted with irreducible plurality?

The answer examined here is universality — not as truth-claim but as ordering mechanism. Universality functions to neutralize difference through abstraction, producing formal equivalence where substantive agreement proves impossible. This lecture situates Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals within this trajectory, reading the categorical imperative not as moral insight but as response to the epistemic crisis of plural moral worlds.

The analysis proceeds in three movements: first, the dissolution of Christian universalism as organizing episteme; second, Foucault's account of epistemic ordering and its utility for diagnosing European knowledge production; third, Kantian formalism as stabilization technology in conditions of moral incoherence.

II. CHRISTIAN UNIVERSALISM AND ITS COLLAPSE

Christian universalism operated as Europe's dominant epistemic ordering system from Late Antiquity through the fragmentation of Christendom. Its organizing principle was not moral but cosmological: all human beings occupied positions within a single divinely authored hierarchy extending from God through angels, rulers, estates, and creation. Moral legibility derived from position within this order. To know what one ought to do required knowing one's place in the cosmic arrangement.

This system did not require philosophical argument. It required institutional enforcement. The Church managed not only sacramental life but epistemic boundaries — what could be known, by whom, and under what authority. Moral disagreement was heresy, an institutional problem requiring correction, not a philosophical problem requiring resolution. Universality functioned through incorporation: all persons were subject to a single ontological order whether or not they recognized it.

The collapse of this system was not primarily theological. It was jurisdictional and commercial. The Reformation shattered sacramental monopoly. The expansion of trade networks exposed Europeans to non-Christian moral orders that could not be dismissed as mere ignorance of the true cosmology. Indigenous legal systems, Islamic jurisprudence, Confucian social organization — these were not simply errors to be corrected but functioning normative orders that generated social coherence without reference to Christian revelation.

By the mid-seventeenth century, Europe confronted an epistemic crisis: plural moral worlds, no shared cosmological foundation, and theological fragmentation that rendered divine command unreliable as arbiter. The Peace of Westphalia formalized this condition institutionally. It did not resolve theological conflict; it removed theology from the domain of enforceable settlement. What remained was the problem of order without cosmic guarantee.

The consequences were not limited to doctrine. If moral knowledge could no longer be derived from position within a divinely ordered hierarchy, it had to be grounded elsewhere. This was not a question of truth. It was a question of stability. How does one produce normative coherence when the cosmological referent has become multiple, contested, and unenforceable?

III. FOUCAULT AND THE EPISTEMIC ORDERING OF MODERNITY

Michel Foucault's The Order of Things diagnoses epistemic regimes as historically contingent systems for organizing knowledge — not as progressive refinements of truth but as distinct configurations that determine what can be known, how objects become legible, and what counts as explanation. Foucault identifies the Classical episteme, dominant from the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth century, as structured by representation, order, and taxonomy. Knowledge functioned through the arrangement of visible signs into classificatory tables that disclosed underlying structure.

This epistemic shift is critical for understanding the production of moral universalism. In the absence of a cosmological foundation, European knowledge production reorganized around the principle of identity and difference. To know something was to locate it within a system of classification. Natural history, political economy, and general grammar all operated according to this logic: difference was managed by being distributed across a grid of positions that rendered it legible and thereby containable.

The epistemic problem posed by moral plurality was isomorphic with the problem posed by New World flora, unfamiliar languages, and non-European governance systems. None could be incorporated into Christian cosmology without remainder. But all could be ordered through classificatory systems that abstracted from particularity to establish formal relations. The result was not incorporation into a single hierarchy but distribution across a neutral grid where difference signified position, not threat.

Foucault's account reveals that Enlightenment moral philosophy did not discover universal principles. It constructed ordering systems capable of managing the instability introduced by irreducible plurality. Moral universalism emerged not because Europeans encountered a truth that transcended local custom, but because local custom had become unmanageable as an epistemic category. Universality provided a formal solution: reduce all moral content to abstract principles that could be applied without reference to substantive disagreement.

This is the epistemic condition Kant inherits. He does not invent the problem of moral order. He systematizes a technology already operative in European knowledge production: abstraction as stabilization.

IV. THE KANTIAN PROBLEM — PLURAL WORLDS AND THE THREAT TO COHERENCE

Kant's moral philosophy must be read against the background of Europe's encounter with functioning non-European normative orders. By the late eighteenth century, European scholars, administrators, and missionaries had documented legal systems, ethical frameworks, and governance structures that generated social order without reference to Christian revelation or European custom. These were not primitive approximations of European norms. They were complete, internally coherent moral worlds.

The implications were destabilizing. If morality varied by culture, geography, and historical circumstance, then European moral practice had no claim to universality. It was simply one arrangement among others. This was not a problem for the curious traveler. It was a crisis for a continent that had spent three centuries claiming unique access to truth, rationality, and legitimate order. European expansion — military, commercial, administrative — required more than force. It required justification. And justification required universality.

Kant's project in the Groundwork addresses this crisis directly. His aim is not to describe existing moral practice. It is to establish a foundation for morality that cannot be relativized by circumstance. He does not argue that people believe in universal principles. He argues that moral obligation itself is unintelligible without them. The question is not what people do but what must be presupposed for moral judgment to function at all.

This is a structural rather than empirical claim. Kant is not interested in cataloging moral diversity. He is interested in what makes moral claims possible. And his answer is that morality requires a foundation independent of inclination, culture, or contingent interest. Without such a foundation, moral obligation collapses into preference, and preference cannot ground duty. Duty requires necessity. Necessity requires a law that binds unconditionally.

The categorical imperative is the formalization of this requirement. It does not tell agents what to do in particular cases. It tells them what form any legitimate moral principle must take. A maxim is morally permissible only if it can be willed as universal law — only if its generalization does not produce contradiction or undermine the conditions of agency itself.

What does this accomplish? It neutralizes substantive moral disagreement by elevating the analysis to the level of form. One need not agree on the content of the good life to agree that moral principles must be universalizable. Universalizability is not a substantive value. It is a procedural constraint. It allows moral legibility to persist across difference because it abstracts from all particularistic content.

This is not tolerance of diversity. It is the subordination of diversity to a formal criterion that decides in advance what counts as moral. Any practice that cannot be universalized is excluded not as wrong but as non-moral. The categorical imperative does not adjudicate between competing moral systems. It renders most of them irrelevant by denying them the status of genuine morality.

V. KANT'S FORMALISM AS TECHNOLOGY OF ABSTRACTION

The Groundwork announces its method in its opening pages. Kant does not begin with empirical observation of moral behavior. He begins with the concept of a good will — the only thing good without qualification. This is not a discovery. It is a stipulation. Kant asserts that morality must be grounded in something unconditioned, and the good will is defined as that which acts from duty rather than inclination.

Duty is distinguished from inclination through a series of examples designed to expose the inadequacy of merely acting in conformity with moral law. An agent who helps others from sympathy may perform the right action, but not from the right motive. Only action performed because it is duty — independent of any inclination, consequence, or reward — qualifies as genuinely moral. This distinction performs critical work. It separates morality from all empirical content: desire, culture, habit, social expectation. What remains is pure form.

The categorical imperative emerges as the principle that explains what duty requires. Its first formulation states: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This is not advice. It is a criterion. It specifies what any moral maxim must satisfy. The examples Kant provides — the false promise, the neglect of talents, the refusal to help others — are not arguments for particular duties. They are tests of the formal procedure.

Each example operates identically. Kant asks whether a proposed maxim can be universalized without contradiction. The lying promise fails because universal lying would destroy the institution of promising itself. The refusal to develop one's talents fails because rational agents cannot will a world in which no one cultivates their capacities. The refusal to help others fails because agents necessarily will that others help them when needed, and thus cannot coherently will a universal maxim of non-assistance.

What is being tested is not the content of the maxim but its logical consistency when generalized. Morality becomes a function of non-contradiction. This is critical. Kant has not argued that lying or laziness or indifference are wrong because they harm others or violate divine command. He has argued that they are wrong because they cannot be coherently universalized. Morality is reduced to formal rationality.

The genius of this move is that it requires no substantive agreement. Agents need not share conceptions of the good, religious commitments, or cultural norms. They need only accept that contradiction is impermissible. Rationality itself becomes the arbiter. And rationality, Kant insists, is universal — not because all people reason identically, but because the structure of reason itself is invariant.

This is abstraction as neutralization. By removing all empirical content from moral judgment, Kant produces a framework that cannot be challenged by pointing to moral diversity. The multiplicity of moral worlds becomes irrelevant. What matters is not what people believe but whether their beliefs satisfy formal criteria of universalizability.

VI. UNIVERSALITY AS SOLUTION TO FRAGMENTATION

The Kantian system does not respond to moral diversity by accommodating it. It responds by making diversity inadmissible as a challenge to universality. This is accomplished through the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives are conditional: if you want X, do Y. They depend on contingent desires and thus vary by agent and circumstance. Categorical imperatives are unconditional: do Y regardless of what you want. They bind all rational agents as such.

This distinction performs the same structural work across multiple domains. In politics, it separates legitimate authority from mere power. In law, it separates justice from custom. In morality, it separates duty from inclination. In each case, the effect is the same: to establish a standard independent of empirical variation that can adjudicate claims without reference to particular traditions or interests.

Kant extends this logic through the second formulation of the categorical imperative: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." This is often interpreted as an ethical principle — respect for persons. But its structural function is more precise. It defines humanity not as biological species but as rational agency. To be human in the morally relevant sense is to be capable of acting according to universal law. This capacity, not cultural identity or historical particularity, is what grounds dignity.

The effect is to abstract personhood from all substantive content. Persons are equivalent not because they share attributes but because they share the formal capacity for rational self-legislation. This makes it possible to speak of universal rights, universal dignity, universal humanity — not by identifying shared values but by positing a shared structure of agency that precedes and underlies all particular commitments.

This is the technology that liberal political order will inherit. Rights do not derive from tradition, consent, or divine grant. They derive from rational agency itself. The state does not create them. It recognizes them. And it recognizes them as universal — binding on all persons simply by virtue of their status as rational agents. This requires no agreement about religion, morality, or the good life. It requires only the acceptance that rational agency is the ground of obligation.

Kant's formalism thus solves the problem of legitimacy in a fragmented world. It generates normativity without requiring substantive consensus. It produces universality without requiring conversion. It stabilizes European moral discourse not by imposing Christian cosmology but by replacing cosmology with procedure.

VII. THE COLONIAL FUNCTION OF ABSTRACT UNIVERSALITY

The structural consequences of Kantian universalism extend beyond moral philosophy. By defining humanity as rational agency and rationality as conformity to universal law, Kant establishes criteria that can be weaponized to exclude populations from the category of full personhood. If morality requires autonomy, and autonomy requires self-legislation according to reason, then those who appear to act from inclination, tradition, or authority rather than rational principle can be classified as not yet fully human.

Kant himself drew this conclusion explicitly in writings on race and geography. Populations incapable of self-governance according to rational principles were, in his account, deficient in the capacity for autonomy. They required tutelage, administration, or paternalistic intervention. This was not cruelty. It was necessity dictated by the formal structure of moral agency itself.

This is not inconsistency in Kant's system. It is its application. If universality is defined through abstraction from all particular content, then particular content becomes evidence of deviation from the universal. Indigenous governance systems, non-European legal traditions, customary practices — all of these appear as failures to achieve the standpoint of pure reason. They are not alternative moral systems. They are immature, incomplete, or corrupted approximations of what morality would be if properly formalized.

The colonial administrator, the missionary, the development expert — all inherit this logic. Their task is not to impose European norms arbitrarily but to bring colonized populations into conformity with universal principles that bind all rational agents. Resistance to these principles is not political disagreement. It is irrationality. It can be dismissed, managed, or corrected without engaging its substantive claims because those claims have already been excluded from the domain of legitimate moral discourse.

Universality thus functions as a mechanism for rendering difference illegible. It does not deny that other practices exist. It denies that they qualify as morality properly understood. This makes intervention justifiable not as conquest but as education, not as domination but as liberation. The colonized are being brought into the universal — which is to say, into conformity with the formal criteria that European philosophy has determined constitute rationality itself.

VIII. LIBERALISM AS INSTITUTIONAL FORMALIZATION

The Kantian framework becomes the organizing logic of liberal political order. Liberalism inherits the principle that legitimate authority must be grounded in universal principles rather than particular traditions. It translates the categorical imperative into constitutional design: the rule of law, formal equality, procedural neutrality. The state must not privilege any substantive conception of the good but must instead guarantee the conditions under which individuals can pursue their own ends within constraints of universal law.

This is formalism extended to the level of governance. Just as Kant abstracts from all empirical content to determine the form of moral law, liberalism abstracts from all substantive difference to determine the form of legitimate political order. Citizens are equal not because they share values but because they share formal status as bearers of rights. Laws are legitimate not because they reflect shared commitments but because they apply universally and can be justified without reference to particular religious or cultural frameworks.

The result is a political order that claims to transcend particularity while encoding one very specific tradition — European Enlightenment rationalism — as the universal itself. The procedures that count as neutral, the rights that count as fundamental, the reasoning that counts as public — all are derived from the epistemic regime within which liberalism emerged. But because these are presented as formal rather than substantive, as procedural rather than cultural, they appear not as choices but as necessities of reason.

This explains liberalism's capacity to expand without appearing imperial. Liberal institutions do not conquer. They universalize. They do not impose foreign norms. They implement rational principles. Resistance is not political opposition but irrationality, tradition, or backwardness. The liberal order thus inherits from Kant the ability to neutralize difference by reclassifying it as deviation from universal form.

Contemporary human rights discourse operates identically. Rights are presented as discovered rather than constructed, universal rather than particular, binding on all states regardless of political tradition or cultural context. Compliance is not optional. It is required by the structure of personhood itself. States that refuse are not asserting alternative political philosophies. They are violating obligations that precede and exceed their sovereignty.

This is not hypocrisy. It is the consistent application of a technology first formalized by Kant: the production of normativity through abstraction from all substantive content, leaving only formal criteria that can be imposed without appearing to impose.

IX. STRUCTURAL CONTINUITY FROM CHRISTIAN TO LIBERAL ORDER

The trajectory from Christian universalism through Kantian formalism to liberal political order is not a story of secularization or progressive refinement. It is a story of institutional adaptation. Each regime confronts the same problem: how to generate normative coherence in the absence of enforceable substantive agreement. Christian cosmology solved this through hierarchical incorporation. Kantian formalism solved it through procedural abstraction. Liberalism solved it through constitutional design.

The continuity lies not in content but in function. In each case, European institutions claim unique access to universality — whether grounded in divine revelation, rational necessity, or human rights. In each case, this claim authorizes intervention into non-European contexts not as conquest but as correction. In each case, difference is managed not through pluralism but through subsumption into a framework that defines in advance what counts as legitimate.

Kant's contribution is not the invention of universality but its formalization in terms compatible with a fragmented, commercially integrated, theologically pluralized Europe. He provides the conceptual infrastructure for producing normativity without cosmology. This makes possible the transition from religious to secular authority without abandoning the claim to universality that religious authority previously secured.

Liberal order inherits this infrastructure. It does not require citizens to believe in God, but it requires them to accept the authority of reason. It does not require agreement on the good life, but it requires agreement that certain procedures are binding. It does not require cultural homogeneity, but it requires conformity to formal criteria of rationality, legality, and rights.

This is why liberalism can present itself as neutral while functioning as a specific normative regime. The neutrality is formal, not substantive. It abstracts from particular commitments while encoding a very particular understanding of what counts as rational, legitimate, and universal. The colonial administrator and the international development expert operate within this same logic. They do not impose culture. They implement universal principles. That these principles happen to require restructuring non-European societies in conformity with European institutional forms is not imperialism. It is necessity dictated by reason itself.

X. INSTITUTIONAL OBSERVATION

Moral universalism, from Christian cosmology through Kantian formalism to liberal constitutionalism, functions as a technology for managing the instability introduced by plurality. It does not resolve disagreement. It renders disagreement inadmissible by excluding from the domain of legitimate discourse any claim that cannot be formalized according to pre-established criteria. The genius of this system is that it operates without requiring belief. It requires only acceptance of procedural constraints presented as rationally necessary rather than culturally contingent.

The institutional persistence of this logic — from Church councils to Enlightenment academies to international human rights tribunals — suggests that universality serves not as discovery of truth but as solution to fragmentation. Its success is measured not by correspondence to moral reality but by capacity to stabilize normative order in conditions where substantive consensus cannot be achieved or enforced.